Loreley > Loreley's Quotes

“From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a glomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“Hitoshi:
I'll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven't a choice. I go.

One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I'll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.

I earnestly pray that a trace of my girl-child self will always be with you.

For waving good-bye, I thank you.”
― Giorgio Amitrano, Moonlight Shadow

“Of that day in which everything was just too beautiful in the transparent winter air, what I remember most is the sight, when I turned back to look, of Hitoshi's black jacket melting into the darkness.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moonlight Shadow

“Without a prospect in sight, day after day went by, like losing one's mind bit by bit.

I would repeat to myself, like a prayer: It's all right, it's all right, the day will come when you'll pull out of this.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moonlight Shadow

“Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck

“Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck

“Ultimately, though, it's living people that frighten me the most. It's always seemed to me that nothing could be scarier than a person, because as dreadful places can be, they're still just places; and no matter how awful ghosts might seem, they're just dead people. I always thought that the most terrifying things anyone could ever think up were the things living people came up with. ”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck

“Up until then, i'd never understood how people could just keep on living (...) Maybe I had a place to belong, but it wasn't something definite, like a seat. It was flowing and formless... Perhaps inside of me, perhaps outside of me. A reason to live, the power to live, a place to belong in this world... I think the essence of that sweet nectar varies from person to person.”
― Nagata Kabi, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

“I lost the things that had given me shape, and as they disappeared, I felt like I was dissolving into thin air.”
― Kabi Nagata, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

“I bet everyone wants to be held,” I thought. Just wanting to be held can make people hurt each other, and lead them into sexual relationships which they then come to depend on. I just want to be held by someone and feel safe in their arms... how hard could that be...”
― Kabi Nagata, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

“Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her.
I often lie reading under the leafy covering of a young birch when the sun broods over the forest. often I visit that cold, cruel mistress of mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the face pressed against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and my prayers go up to her.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck

“There was madness in memory, especially when the memory wasn't yours.”
― Grace Draven, Radiance

“Loneliness is an empty void. We look for that friend in the light (...) or in the case of humans, in the dark.”
― Grace Draven, Radiance